“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, slipping his hand around my cheek. “Either way, I understand you. I want you to know that.”
He leaned forward to kiss me, and the whole complicated world disappeared. As our lips touched, I pressed myself against him and wound my bare legs around his. I was wet again, my muscles tightly-strung and my heart throbbing hard. It had only been an hour since he was inside me, and I wanted him again. Badly.
As if on instinct, I opened my eyes just as light arced across the bedroom wall. Drex heard the sound before I did, the distant crunch of tires on gravel and the low roar of a car engine.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
Rolling quickly away from me, he got up. He shut off the wall switch, leaving the room dark except for the glow from the terrace. “Hell of a guard dog in the living room,” he muttered. “Not even a bark.”
I sat up in bed. “What is it?”
“Shhh.” He went to the window and pulled the drapes back an inch. “Somebody’s here.”
“Somebody?” I whispered.
“Yeah. Might be some guys I don’t want to see.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s just say I’ve got some old scores to settle. Personal ones, that go back years.”
An engine turned off and a car door shut. I felt a cold jolt of fear. The whole house was silent.
“You said something about the security here,” I said, a shudder bristling across my skin.
“The lack thereof,” Drex said. “This is exactly what I meant.”
His expression was stone-cold and emotionless. After a minute, he leaned toward the window and peered out again. I heard him mumble something under his breath.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m not sure. There’s one truck and three men, from what I can see.”
“Could it be your father?”
“He wouldn’t come looking for me,” Drex said, reaching for the nightstand drawer. “Not unless he wanted something from me, and he knows better than to ask.”
I saw a glint of metal as he stuck something in his waistband. “What’s that?”
“A gun,” he said matter-of-factly. “You think a gun store owner has a house without one? Or ten?”
Arms crossed, he leaned against the wall and waited. He looked almost bored. We were in the middle of nowhere and outnumbered, but Drex seemed more inconvenienced than anything else.
The nerve of the man. He either had a spine of steel or a very good poker face.
There were footsteps outside the window and around the house. Neither of us said a word. Eventually, the truck’s engine roared to life. Headlights lit up the drapes, and the men drove off.
I let out a long, tense sigh. Drex didn’t move until everything was dark and silent again.
“I’m surprised they left,” he said, putting the gun back in the drawer. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“Could they have come to see the owner?” I asked.
“He doesn’t live here. It’s an investment property for him. Everybody knows he lives in a fortress on the other side of Chimayo.”
“You didn’t recognize the truck?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t been here in a long time. I remember a few people, but hopefully they don’t remember me.” There was a faint note of amusement in his voice.
“Maybe it was a mistake,” I said, walking over to him. “A wrong turn or something.”
“There are no wrong turns out here. Only people looking for trouble.”
“You think they were looking for you?”
He pulled back the drapes and looked out, scanning the empty driveway and the dirt road running across the desert. “Maybe they were. Or…” He quirked his mouth.
“Or?” I said.
Letting the curtain drop, he turned toward me. “Or maybe, darlin’, they were looking for you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I left Jane asleep in bed the next morning, her hair spread temptingly across the pillow and her bare shoulder rising and falling with every breath.
She didn’t want to go to the police, and neither did I. All I wanted was to slide up behind her and wake her with my hard cock, but instead I quietly got dressed and left the house. Somebody had to do something intelligent for the first time in almost twenty-four hours.
I drove into Chimayo to the station where one of my high-school buddies, Miles, was a homicide detective. We’d kept in sporadic touch, and he was always the first guy I contacted when my father was wreaking havoc and I needed inside information.
On the way into town, I called and gave him Jane’s story. By the time I got to the station, he’d looked up everything there was to know about her. Which was absolutely nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. But a far cry from what I was hoping for.
“You only got one call about her, yesterday morning?” I asked.
Miles leaned back in his worn, creaky desk chair. “Yup. Gas station manager saw her walking through town half-dressed and called it in, thinking she was some psycho. By the time we sent somebody out, she was gone.”
“And no missing person’s report.”
“Nope, not from any state in the country. Even Alaska and Hawaii.” Miles grinned as if impressed by his own attention to detail.
“How about Mexico?” I asked. “Could she have been reported missing there?”
“Maybe,” he said, pulling absently at his goatee, “but she’s an American. When an American vanishes in Mexico it usually grabs somebody’s attention. We get a few of those a month, usually a drug mule or a suicide.”
“So you’re saying nobody’s missing this girl? If you saw her, you’d understand why I find that hard to believe.”
Miles shrugged his wide, rounded shoulders. “Not everybody’s life is neat and tidy, especially down here. People on the run, nutcases, addicts –”
I swallowed down a surge of frustration. It wasn’t Miles’s fault, but he was in the regrettable position of being the only one in the room with me. “I told you on the phone, she’s not one of those.”
He put his worn-soled boots up on his desk and crossed his ankles. “How do you know? How do you know this alleged memory loss isn’t a story she invented so you’d do what you’re doing now? Taking care of her? Leaving her in John Manson’s nice, big house all by herself?”
“Instinct,” I said without a moment’s doubt. “That’s how I know.”
He gave me the jaded look of a man who’d been jerked around by a woman more than once. “Many a guy’s life has gone to shit because of an instinct about a pretty girl.” He put his hands behind his head and laced his fingers. “Did you fuck her?”
I squinted at him. “Miles.”
“Oh, great,” he said, with a sigh. “You fucked her. This situation’s not complicated enough?”
I had to smile. “Like I said, you gotta see her.”
“Come on, Drex. Think about it. You know how many drugs cause memory loss?”
“For Christ’s sake.”
He gave me a look of mock innocence. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just trying to talk some sense into you, is all.”
“Sorry,” I said, leaning against the chipped gray wall. “This whole thing has got me stumped.”
“You take a picture of her?”
“Not yet. She’d probably have decked me if I tried. I mean, she did deck me, but that was about something else.”
“She’s a spunky one, huh?” Miles said with a suggestive twitch of his eyebrows.
“To say the least.”
He took a long swig from a Styrofoam cup. “Well, I wish I had better news for you. At least with your dad we know he’s around here somewhere. It’s just a matter of smoking him out of his hole.”
“Nobody’s spotted him recently, though?”
“Not since you came to town.”
I snorted. That was how it always went. As soon as I showed up, the man turned into a phantom, capable of vanishing into the dese
rt without leaving so much as a footprint.
“Hey, listen,” I said. “You know anybody around here who drives a green F-250? About five years old? Dent in the front fender? Big mud flaps?”
Miles frowned. “Where’d you see it?”
“At John’s house, last night. After midnight. Drove in, hung around ten minutes, drove away.”
“Nothing comes to mind but I’ll keep an eye out. You know how many transients we get around here. Don’t read too much into it.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got an instinct.”
Miles shook his head. “Those instincts again. Someday they’ll get you into one hell of a quandary.”
“I think they already have.”
Leaving his office, I tried really hard to stay frustrated. Instead of finding Elijah and getting back to the company that needed me, I was wasting precious time trying to figure out how a blue-eyed stunner had walked out of an ugly Chimayo afternoon and straight into my life.
But now that I knew nobody was looking for her, all I felt was relief. Relief and the crazy urge to drive back to the house at Nascar speeds to see her.
It was tough to admit but damnit, it was the truth. Every day Jane stayed lost was another day she got to stay with me.
Sitting in my truck in the station parking lot, I called every hospital in a two-hundred mile radius to ask if any female patients had left without being discharged. I’d never heard the word no so many times in one day, not since I’d tried to get investment for my first pool hall.
No, you’re too young. No, you’ve got a record. No, your ideas will never work.
I remembered how close I’d been to fulfilling Elijah’s shitty prediction about me. If it hadn’t been for Brooke Marshall’s father, I might still be a self-taught shark with a dream and a pile of ill-gotten gains in the bank.
If Brooke knew what I was dealing with down here, she wouldn’t like it one bit. Not just because her father only invested in people he considered “above board” with “impeccable reputations.” She was still in love with me, as hard and as often as she tried to deny it.
It didn’t help that she worked for me and saw me every day. But that had been a condition of the investment: give the woman who’d never had to work a day in her life a job she wasn’t qualified for, simply because she liked the title. I’d surrounded her with competent people to keep her from screwing up too much, but what I hadn’t been able to do was change her attitude. That rich-girl sense of entitlement that rankled every time I looked at her.
Some of us had come up from nothing. Some of us still worked our asses off like there was a wolf at the door, because we knew someday, there might be.
I owed Brooke a lot, I knew that. If she hadn’t vouched for me, her father never would have given me a dime, let alone millions. I had to admit, she’d done a bang-up job of explaining things that made me look like a very bad bet. Articles online, rumors, grainy photographs taken in bars.
When I’d first met Scott, I was an ambitious, win-at-any-cost professional gambler with a felon for a father and a taste for the fast life. Now I was a success story, the reformed bad boy who mixed in polite society and collected wine and sculpture.
But since I’d decided to expand the company to other states, my tie to Brooke and Scott felt more like a stranglehold. I didn’t like being controlled by anybody, no matter how much they’d done for me. I’d paid Scott back ten times over, and as far as I was concerned, the debt was settled. Any future investment would require only that I work tirelessly for the company I’d built.
As for Brooke, her position at Cougan Inc. needed to be renegotiated. Immediately.
I had unfinished business that I’d let linger way too long. Meeting Jane made me want to wrap up loose ends, turn over a new leaf, and God knew what other clichés.
She was the kind of woman who could change a man for the better just by being around. Trouble was, I knew she wouldn’t be around for long.
When I woke, Drex was gone.
Along with a still-hot pot of coffee, there was a note on the kitchen island. Gone to take care of some business. Back in the afternoon.
If he’d gone to the police, it was too late to stop him. Even if I’d tried, he wouldn’t have listened.
As I filled a mug, I knew I should feel bad about what had happened on the counter, the table, and Drex’s bed. But I didn’t. Whatever I’d done, I’d done it because I wanted to live and be happy.
I didn’t know what past was waiting for me, but Drex was right – we only had today. The hospital had found nothing wrong, but what if they’d missed something? What if I had a month to live, or less? Shouldn’t I enjoy the time I had?
That was easy to say with no memory or responsibilities. I didn’t even have a change of clothes to weigh me down.
I went to the marble ensuite bathroom to wash my face and comb my hair with Drex’s comb. At the sight of my kiss-bruised lips in the mirror, a sexy shiver went through me. The pleasure of moaning Drex’s name had been matched only by the thrill of following his orders, on my knees surrounded by broken dishes.
Maybe I liked giving up control after three days of craziness and confusion, or maybe I’d always been like this. Either way, I couldn’t wait for him come back and do it all over again.
If he didn’t bring the police instead. Considering my three-day spree of criminal offenses, it was amazing they hadn’t tracked me down already.
Somebody at the motel must have called 911 after they found the stone-drunk trucker tied to the vinyl headboard in their cheapest room a hundred miles from here. He deserved to be tied up – worse, actually – but I’d done him a favor by leaving it at that and taking what little cash he had on him.
I figured he owed it to me after promising me a meal and a bed for the night, no strings attached. Right.
Another hard lesson learned: don’t hitchhike just because you saw some hippie guy doing it on his way to a music festival. I hoped that in my real life, I never would have done something so stupid.
If a cruiser hadn’t pulled into the motel parking lot just as I was gagging the trucker with his own shirt, I wouldn’t have had to leave my shorts behind. But it was either get my cutoffs or get the hell out of there, and I was not about to go to jail for doing what was only fair.
I’d had to walk around in my panties for only twelve hours, luckily – if walking around in one’s panties could be counted as luck.
Days of exhaustion and hunger had made me just delusional enough to think that I could fly half-naked under the radar if I acted with enough confidence. If anyone asked – and no one dared – I’d say it was a bikini, and I missed my ride home from the pool. Talk about flimsy.
That I was only gaped at by the two police officers who passed me was a miracle. I’d hoped to find a dress or pants drying on a backyard line, but it wasn’t meant to be. I was meant to meet Drex Cougan, something that never would have happened if I’d been in my right mind to begin with.
It was incredible that the men in the white coats hadn’t gotten to me first. There were benefits to being in this wild, lawless part of the country, where a girl without pants was just another bizarre sight to behold.
I slipped out of Drex’s shirt, a beautiful, dark purple button-down with French cuffs. He’d given it to me to sleep in, after he’d ravished me senseless one more time in his bed.
The morning light streamed in the window, illuminating the hand-painted tile floor. Yesterday morning at this time, I’d been in a run-down Greyhound station wondering how I was going to eat, and now I was standing in a bathroom so elegant I almost hated to use it. Almost.
The water poured out of an open-spout glass faucet like a waterfall, and the shower was a warm, soothing rainstorm. I stood under it for fifteen minutes and imagined it rinsing away the shame and confusion of the last three days. I still had no memory, but right now, I was safe.
I dried off with a thick towel and draped it over a slender chrome towel bar. Peering in the cabinet above th
e sink, I found a bottle of body lotion and pumped some into my hand. I rubbed it slowly into my skin, breathing in the soft smell of verbena. It was a small thing, but it felt like the ultimate luxury.
The touch of a sexy man, a shower, a beautiful scent. I would appreciate every second for as long as it lasted.
Hair combed, teeth brushed, legs shaved – I felt ready for almost anything. Just as I was turning to reach for Drex’s shirt, I noticed something in the mirror.
I stopped. And then I gasped.
There were four silvery, inch-long streaks across my lower belly. Stretchmarks.
“No,” I whispered. “God, no.”
They were so pale that I’d missed them. But now, with the sun coming in at just the right angle, they were unmistakable.
Suddenly dizzy and breathless, I leaned my hands against the sink.
Living for right now, enjoying the moment – it was all bullshit.
I was a mother. The physical evidence was screaming at me in the mirror. And this ring I’d tried so hard to ignore? There was no doubt in my mind now. It was a wedding band.
Three days without my memory and I’d already betrayed my family, whoever and wherever they were.
I sank onto the floor, unable to hold back tears. Drex made me want to pretend I had no past, but I couldn’t reinvent myself that easily. What did they say about the past always catching up with you? Well, it hadn’t caught up to me yet, but it was gaining ground fast.
A child. Maybe more than one. Was I a stay-at-home mother? A working mom? Did I have a girl or boy?
And who was the man who’d given me that child? Did I love him? Could I possibly want him as much as I’d wanted Drex last night? As much as I wanted him right now?
I covered my face with my hands. There were a thousand questions whirling through my head, but one kept rising to the top.
Why wasn’t the man who’d given me this ring looking for me? What was taking him so long?
I had no answers. I only knew I was much too restless to sit still.
Marching to the bedroom, I put on Drex’s shorts and a white t-shirt. Flip-flops on my feet, I went to the living room, grabbed Diesel’s leash from the coffee table, and opened her kennel. She raised her chin and looked at me like I was both dense and insane.
Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 3) Page 7
